I am trying to follow this tutorial on configuring nginx-ingress-controller for a Kubernetes cluster I deployed to AWS using kops.

https://daemonza.github.io/2017/02/13/kubernetes-nginx-ingress-controller/

When I run kubectl create -f ./nginx-ingress-controller.yml, the pods are created but error out. From what I can tell, the problem lies with the following portion of nginx-ingress-controller.yml:

volumes:
        - name: tls-dhparam-vol
          secret:
            secretName: tls-dhparam
        - name: nginx-template-volume
          configMap:
            name: nginx-template
            items:
            - key: nginx.tmpl
              path: nginx.tmpl

Error shown on the pods:

MountVolume.SetUp failed for volume "nginx-template-volume" : configmaps "nginx-template" not found

This makes sense, because the tutorial does not have the reader create this configmap before creating the controller. I know that I need to create the configmap using:

kubectl create configmap nginx-template --from-file=nginx.tmpl=nginx.tmpl

I've done this using nginx.tmpl files found from sources like this, but they don't seem to work (always fail with invalid NGINX template errors). Log example:

I1117 16:29:49.344882       1 main.go:94] Using build: https://github.com/bprashanth/contrib.git - git-92b2bac
I1117 16:29:49.402732       1 main.go:123] Validated default/default-http-backend as the default backend
I1117 16:29:49.402901       1 main.go:80] mkdir /etc/nginx-ssl: file exists already exists
I1117 16:29:49.402951       1 ssl.go:127] using file '/etc/nginx-ssl/dhparam/dhparam.pem' for parameter ssl_dhparam
F1117 16:29:49.403962       1 main.go:71] invalid NGINX template: template: nginx.tmpl:1: function "where" not defined

The image version used is quite old, but I've tried newer versions with no luck.

 containers:
        - name: nginx-ingress-controller
          image: gcr.io/google_containers/nginx-ingress-controller:0.8.3

This thread is similar to my issue, but I don't quite understand the proposed solution. Where would I use docker cp to extract a usable template from? Seems like the templates I'm using use a language/syntax incompatible with Docker...?